Re: New Year's Resolution: learn another language

[graffitici]

I'm surprised that out of all the languages that were suggested, Lisp hasn't found its place in the list. Although it may not be used very widely in the industry, it's a very important language historically. It probably was the first functional scripting language, and it first implemented garbage collection and dynamic typing, features found in Perl today. I strongly believe that it still is a very valid tool

Since you don't have a CS background, I should also point out that Scheme (a dialect of Lisp) is taught to freshmen CS majors for their first programming class by many universities (including MIT). Take a look at TeachScheme. Furthermore, there are many online textbooks available to get you started, and a very good IDE (that works under Linux). Here are some links:

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, a classic textbook originating from MIT.
• How to Design Programs, a very good introductory textbook
• Dr. Scheme, the Scheme IDE
• Paul Graham's web site, has a lot of essays on Lisp

[dsheroh]

Agreed, although I see Lisp has gotten a second mention since your post. Lisp was my first thought when I read the question. (Well, the first serious one... "Perl 6" came to mind first, but it was a joke answer.) I took the Scheme class based on Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs in college and I remember it as having been by far the most fun language I've ever dabbled in, although that may have been mostly the novelty of it being so different from anything I'd done before. Unfortunately, the course didn't go into the language deeply enough to actually do anything useful with it, so I never touched the language again after the course was done. (I should go back and play with it some more... I might even still have the book...)

As others have said, you can't go wrong with C, but I'm not sure whether it's as different as you might be looking for.

[convenientstore]

graffitici , thanks for the info. This looks like great CS material to get some background and hope to improve my perl.
I am still consider newbie on perl but I will also be trying out SQL to interface w/ Perl as well as XML